by Anny Scoones
It seems somebody once made a serious effort to bring public art to James Bay. It’s a funny thing about public art—sometimes when a deliberate attempt is made to enrich culture, the art is simply ignored, deteriorates, or is even vandalized, and other times, when public art is created spontaneously, it is treasured and becomes an intricate (and intimate) part of the personality of the neighbourhood. At one time, James Bay was beautified by adding tile mosaics in various locations in the village, and today they look a little tired, but the tired look actually suits the neighbourhood. On the other hand, there are graffiti and murals that are glowing with life and were completely unplanned. Sometimes we just cannot plan or dictate “beauty”—a neighbourhood has to take its own form.
Ogden Point
The Ogden Point breakwater was constructed from millions of tons of cement and granite slabs in the early 1900s in anticipation of increased sea trade from the construction of the Panama Canal. The unmanned lighthouse with an electric foghorn was added in 1919.
It is worth a stroll to the end of the breakwater just to get a sense of the scale of the project and to see the granite slabs. One of the most amazing things, given that we are in an age of fear of liability, is that there is no guard rail—you are out there in the fresh sea breeze with the great jade-grey waves crashing below your feet. It’s a wild ocean walk on a stormy day!
The waters around the breakwater are a popular diving area. Today, Ogden Point is used mainly as a docking spot for numerous cruise ships, usually heading up to Alaska, and other visiting and Coast Guard vessels.
The Ogden Point breakwater and docking area are under the watchful eye of the Ogden Point Enhancement Society (established in 1996). The society has contributed to beautifying the area as a lovely public space with informative kiosks, benches, pocket gardens, walkways, and viewpoints, which make it very attractive to the ships’ tourists as well as to the locals.
One of the most impressive features of Ogden Point is the Unity Wall, also known as “the land and sea mural.” The Unity Wall is the world’s longest mural and is on one side of the breakwater. The mural depicts the rich spiritual and traditional cultures, symbolism, legends, teachings, and history of the Salish Nations and was created by local First Nations students.
Just up the street from my house is Emily Carr’s house, her birthplace, and now a museum, a lovely yellow Victorian house with primroses and little pink tea roses in a circular garden in the front. Gravel pathways wind their way between lilies and fragrant mock orange shrubs and lilacs. I wonder if Emily Carr even had tea. She was so rustic—or at least she became that way. I can picture her sitting on a tree stump in the woods that she loved, surrounded by her beloved grey salt- and wind-weathered leaning totem poles, drinking strong, day-old coffee from a rusted and chipped enameled pot; I can’t really see her drinking tea in her forest days. Just because she lived (at one time) in an elegant town in an English society and did lovely watercolours (one of my favourites is of Beacon Hill Park, looking up the hill) doesn’t really mean she “took” tea from little china cups, does it? Well, maybe it does. Her fingers became so thick and muscular, I doubt she could even fit her finger through the delicate handle of a teacup. Maybe she had some kind of First Nations tea made from roots or berries.
Emily Carr’s Birthplace
My grandfather, Harold Mortimer-Lamb, Mum’s father, also lived here in James Bay. He did photography in his spare time and was a friend of Emily’s. (Mum says he invented a way of taking photographs at night. “But in the daytime,” she says with a laugh, “I remember him taking photos under a blanket.”) In fact, Grandpa Harold took a photograph of Emily Carr, the one with her arms crossed, wearing a little cap, hard and weathered, staring at the camera. I have the photo, and I also have an ashtray she made with local clay; it looks like a whale’s mouth, and it’s painted with First Nations symbols in red and dark green and signed on the bottom right in the clay: Klee Wyck. I suppose she gave it to my grandfather—they were both in the local art world—although Mum says they had a big disagreement. Emily actually hit Harold (in the days long before the word “abuse” was used). That was the end of the relationship; she was hot-tempered and made art, and he was cold and aloof and collected art—small wonder that they parted, but completely understandable that they met and conversed, for a while at least.
People are very friendly in James Bay. The other day a nice man who collects buckets of household compost on the back of his bicycle stopped to rest, and we chatted (I was planting cauliflower in the front garden). Somehow we got talking about plastics. He told me that there is an amoeba in the Amazon that eats plastic—LOVES plastic—but that it is contained. Imagine if the amoeba got loose! Wouldn’t it be ironic if the world ended because of a plastic-eating creature? It would eat your car bumpers and most of the contents in a Hawaiian gift shop, and then consume your credit cards for dessert—it would be the demise of Western civilization!
Here is something else about James Bay: if people don’t want something, they put it on the street for the taking. This habit was absolutely outlawed by Victoria’s first mayor, Thomas Harris, in 1862. The first time I saw this interesting tradition was the day after I moved in. Archie was dragging me down the street because he saw a little dog in the distance (it’s a strange dog—he has no hair, but his skin is a lovely deep chestnut-brown, and he is walked by a little Spanish man). A lady came out of a pink house and put a box of old cassette tapes under a tree with a sign saying PLEASE HELP YOURSELF. The next day her neighbour put out a futon (with limited stains) and an electric toothbrush (with the brush). Her sign simply said TAKE AWAY—and someone did!
I had done some sorting for the move and was also having some electrical work done in our dear little white house, so I decided to try this method of disposal. I went out at dawn and on the boulevard I gingerly set out a book on menopause, a dirty, yellowed plastic chandelier with half its “drops” missing, some broken smoke alarms, my battered riding helmet, and a pair of yoga leotards. My feeble little note in black marker said FREE FOR YOU TODAY! NO HST. I was nervous that nobody would want my goods, but everything was gone by noon! One day, a few blocks away, I spied a huge, rather mildewed book of New Yorker cartoons, which I grabbed (on top of a blue velour recliner with a missing lever).
The book amused me all afternoon as I sat with Alice Mary and Archie on the back lawn amongst my pink-tinged cauliflower (due to being planted beside the beets) and my cabbages, which were becoming so large that they were splitting. There was a wonderful cartoon of a dog in a business suit, carrying a briefcase, leaning over a bar, and the bartender (who was a man) said, “The usual? Scotch and toilet water?” And another of two men walking their dogs in the park, and one dog was tiny, really tiny, and the man walking this tiny dog said, “Yes, they used to be bred as hors d’oeuvres.” Well, when I finished the book I put it back out on the boulevard, and it quickly disappeared.
One day I picked up a candle holder—a curly, black, ornate thing with dirty glass cups that held little candles, but as soon as I got it into the kitchen to clean it, I regretted picking it up. Why did I? Because it was free and I like candles, and because it was there in front of me at that moment, and I grabbed it without thinking. Gosh, I can understand why some people become hoarders. Late that night, when I took Archie around the block for his nightly walk, I discreetly put the candle holder back on the boulevard whence it came, and it was gone at dawn.
Every morning and late afternoon, I walk Archie to the beaches along Dallas Road. Archie went to dog school, but it didn’t do a thing for him. He pulls me down the street in his new red harness; one of my arms is stretched beyond belief from holding him, the other arm flails sideways, waving the little blue disposal bag. He can hardly wait to get to the beach, a place where I feel the closest to heaven, so I can hardly wait to get there too!
Along the way we pass all sorts of houses painted in shades of teal, purple, and burgundy—that’s something special I love about J
ames Bay. All the homes and yards and gardens are so varied, no one garden or front yard is like another—there is no pressure to conform. There’s an old stone house with a lime-green picket fence and a purple house with turrets covered in climbing honeysuckle that stretches up to a little balcony where, at night, a thin man with a wispy beard strums on a guitar.
Many houses in James Bay are from the late 1800s and early 1900s. In the Victorian era, homes were painted in bright colours—usually three, including the trim—in order to accentuate the elegant decorative designs around the windows, balconies, doors, and eaves. These colourful homes were called “painted ladies.”
There’s a little cottage with moss on the roof, barely visible behind a mass of quince, lilac, and clematis gone wild. There’s a house that puts dog water out in an old saucepan under some hanging baskets of geraniums. A rare sight is a red-brick house. There is one on our walk, covered in pale yellow climbing roses that lead up to a white railing piled with an endless array of clay flower pots. There is a large, elegant, dark green-shingled house with a wraparound veranda, and in the window is an enormous sculpture of a voluptuous, curvy, copper scallop shell. And there’s one house with numerous hanging baskets dangling from its porch, but on closer inspection they are not baskets at all; they are bicycle helmets full of little succulents and sedums.
That’s the thing about James Bay: everyone can be unique without feeling odd—everything is accepted. I don’t think anything would shock James Bay. It’s had a rough history but remains quite unjaded. Besides being an original farm that grew food for the workers who were busy building the city, the far end of James Bay—which is now the cruise-ship port and home of the city’s Coast Guard docks, backed by glimmering turquoise glass penthouses—was a shipyard, historically considered a seedy and dangerous place for young girls to go. I met a woman named Frances at the Stroke Recovery Club (I haven’t had a stroke—I go there to read to them) and she told me that she lived in James Bay as a girl but was never allowed to go below Oswego Street or her father would take the belt to her. So James Bay has had this rather sordid, boisterous past, not the quaint tea party, ice cream parlour and toffee-shoppe past found in other neighbourhoods, but its history has perhaps given it its wonderful variety and the tolerance I feel when I walk the streets.
I passed a little house one day with a mass of wildflowers covering the front garden—poppies and goldenrod and marigold mixed with grass and shrubs, all slowly going back to nature, contained by a rotting fence and shaded by a great leafy maple. Pinned to the fence was a poem, the paper slightly mildewed, and beside the poem was a photograph of a scruffy bearded man in a soiled red coat. He was a local character, homeless, who had died, and someone had written this poem to honour him, to offer him a little dignity—that’s James Bay. Some red plastic flowers had been placed in the fence, just beneath his photo.
You can smell the damp sea air and hear the cries of seagulls all through the day. People find seagulls (and crows) bothersome, but I think they are very intelligent and, more important, compassionate—they take care of each other. There was a sad little seagull in our neighbourhood when we moved here. He was a feeble, thin, grey bird who spent his days crying on top of our roof. The neighbours and I soon deduced that he couldn’t fly. In fact, one day he tumbled off the roof and landed in my kale, and Archie went hysterical! Somehow, the bird managed to crawl and hop onto the garage roof, which is flat, where he remained for days while numerous other seagulls called to him and brought him mouthfuls of food, which looked to be mostly shellfish and seaweed (the shells are still on the roof). His family never disowned him, but stayed by him until he could fly away, which he eventually did about three weeks later, and the neighbours and I all watched and rooted for the little fellow as he flapped off toward the beach, surrounded by his relations.
Two crows have built a big nest of sticks in the hawthorn tree outside my office window. One day I saw a robin flying desperately at them above the power lines—the bad crows had stolen the robin’s eggs, and she was in despair. Oh, nature can be so cruel, sometimes more cruel than we can be—we have the power to be kind. Mum told me a horrific story of seeing two crows go after a young eagle that had raided their nest; they swarmed the eagle like a pair of bullies and forced him down into the river, where they drowned the poor screaming bird. On the other hand, Mum also tells the story of two crows that live in her garden and have babies every year; one year they had a little white crow! They protected it fiercely and it never left home; all three still reside in Mum’s apple tree, years later.
Finally Archie and I arrive at the Dallas Road seafront, the place where we heard the brass band from the Chilean ship in the mist. In the meadow above the seafront is a man-made pond where elderly men periodically reenact the Battle of the North Atlantic with their remote-controlled miniature war vessels.
Like many other road names and landmarks in Victoria, Dallas Road is named after an officer of the Hudson’s Bay Company. A.G. Dallas was also a son-in-law of James Douglas. Dallas Road stretches along the whitecapped, bottle-green sea. On windy days the sea pounds against the black lava and rose-pink granite shore, which is heavily scratched from past glacier action and pocketed with little living tidal pools with busy creatures darting about their day’s duties.
At one end (the cruise-ship end) of the walkway is a solid cement barricade, pockmarked and painted light aqua. It looks as if it is from another era and place—perhaps from a British seaside town where you might see a man selling little ice creams and popsicles from a musical cart, and red-striped deck chairs on the promenade, and peppermint sticks being sold from a beach kiosk. I love this barricade, but I have a rather sad feeling that it will be replaced one day by something slick and new. What a shame that will be—another tradition to say goodbye to. I am sure some people think that the heavy old sea-sprayed “wall” is ugly. It’s not pretty, but it’s better than pretty. There’s even an old concrete gunnery halfway along, which leads down to the sandy beach, the bottom few steps covered in green seaweed and barnacles. I met an old man one day who was strolling the sand at low tide, and he told me that he remembers the gunnery also being used as a lifeguard station.
I worry sometimes that we are too “pretty” oriented—I wonder why everything always has to be pretty and hope that sometimes character and ambience can be considered as valuable as prettiness. That’s why I love Bob McDonald, the man on the CBC who does the science programs—he never straightened his teeth!
Archie and I wade through the waist-high grass toward the cement steps to the beach. In summer the grasses quiver in the breeze and reveal a meadow of mauves and jades, making room for the delicate wild onion and white yarrow. Great shrubberies of Nootka rose, hawthorns and poplars huddle together in thick, dense clusters to break the winter sea gales that come roaring up the cliffs.
Under an old, lone, worn and ragged crabapple tree, covered in a tangle of sticks and thick vegetation, is a weatherworn granite stone, engraved to the memory of a five-year-old girl named Bertha who arrived on a ship from San Francisco in 1872. The little girl had smallpox and was placed in a pest house (on Dallas Road), where she died. The title “pest house” sounds dirty, even rather naughty, as if it were a place of debauchery, but it actually was like a sanatorium where people were quarantined if they had one of the dreaded diseases of the time, such as cholera, tuberculosis, or smallpox. Sadly, pest houses usually included graveyards.
Archie and I pass the stone for little Bertha, so I think about her every day, and I am moved that the City Parks workers, big, burly men in orange rubber overalls, cut the grasses back just a little, so that her stone receives a sliver of sunlight but not too much attention, on their twice-a-year mowings; it’s as if they too respect her short little life, which ended very near this grassy wild spot. Her stone overlooks the sea from under the black branches dotted with small, round orange fruit; saturated by the rains, the crabapples drop around her as food for the winter birds.
We’ve come far with science and health and disease since Bertha died in the Dallas Road pest house, but in other ways we seem to have new health troubles—I wonder if we’ll ever get it right. Perhaps our vast knowledge of medicine today is a curse—now that we know so many cures, we can relax a little and therefore allow other ailments to creep in. We seem to be so confident of our good life that it has taken the edge off prevention, as if we are verging on overindulgence.
A short stroll past Bertha’s stone is a monument honouring Marilyn Bell, who braved our cold green waters in 1956 and swam the strait, the first woman to do so; she was also the first to swim across Lake Ontario and the youngest to swim the English Channel. Her stone, amongst the spring bluebells on Dallas Road, is more visible, bigger, and a little fancier than Bertha’s, with an etched picture of her head, smiling and wearing a bathing cap.
In the spring, the meadows along Dallas Road are a sea of bluebells, followed two weeks later by a rush of deep cobalt camas. The banks are a mass of wild, pale yellow lupines, so delicate in appearance yet so strong, the way they hang on to the sandy banks during the winter storms; they grow amongst a tangle of magenta sweet peas. Clusters of sea-battered, thorny yellow gorse lean stiffly toward the street from years of bowing against the wind and salt, and below, between the black rocks and pink granite of the shoreline are sea-washed beaches of pebbles, shells, and sea glass. Whenever I see sea glass, those little jewel-like, salt-washed pieces of glass amongst the sand and shells, I think of Mother Nature reclaiming what is hers—sand.
The oystercatchers and great blue herons are on the rocks every morning as the tides change, picking in the hidden crevices and the thick kelp beds for a meal, and in late autumn the dear little harlequin ducks appear, distinguished by their auburn sides and striking white markings, bobbing and diving in the waves between the black rocks. They winter on the coast and return inland to breed in the spring, the only sea ducks that need inland whitewater streams as part of their life cycle; there they lay their eggs on the streambanks, hidden in hollowed trees and in the thick, sheltered underbrush. Their feather designs are so magnificent that they are also known as the “circus duck.” They make a little peep-peep squeak, which I can hear on the beach, and it is because of this sound that they are also called the “sea mouse.”